The present invention is directed to the field of computer-implemented knowledge repositories. More specifically, the present invention is directed to computer-implemented interfaces to knowledge repositories.
Modern business enterprises generate sizeable amounts of data concerning the operation and performance of their businesses. This data is typically stored within a large data warehouse, or some other large database infrastructure. Business analysts then review this voluminous data in order to make business recommendations. The data may be analyzed manually, in order to develop an intuition about the data, or to pick up patterns in the data, or it may be analyzed using statistical software to determine trends, clusters of data, etc.
More recently, with the explosion of Internet-related traffic, business enterprises are generating volumes of data that are one or more orders of magnitude larger than before. This increase in scale has made it almost impossible to develop an intuition about the data or to pick up patterns in the data by simply examining the data in its original form. Similarly, this increase in scale has made it difficult to manually execute separate statistical analyses on the data. Knowledge repository software applications have surfaced, but remain difficult to use on a wide-scale. Much of this difficulty stems from using traditional cumbersome methods of interfacing with the software applications.
The present invention overcomes these difficulties and others. In accordance with the teachings of the present invention, a computer-implemented knowledge repository data interface system and method are used by client applications to interact with a plurality of knowledge repositories. The knowledge repositories contain analytical models of interest to the client applications. A request handling module receives a request regarding the models from one of the client applications over a network. Knowledge repository application programming interfaces (APIs) are used to retrieve data about the models in the knowledge repositories based upon the received request.